←back to thread

A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

(addxorrol.blogspot.com)
475 points zdw | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.407s | source
Show context
Al-Khwarizmi ◴[] No.44487564[source]
I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent.

The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing an UI events API and you were talking about zeros and ones, or voltages in transistors. Technically fine but totally useless to reach any conclusion about the high-level system.

We need a higher abstraction level to talk about higher level phenomena in LLMs as well, and the problem is that we have no idea what happens internally at those higher abstraction levels. So, considering that LLMs somehow imitate humans (at least in terms of output), anthropomorphization is the best abstraction we have, hence people naturally resort to it when discussing what LLMs can do.

replies(18): >>44487608 #>>44488300 #>>44488365 #>>44488371 #>>44488604 #>>44489139 #>>44489395 #>>44489588 #>>44490039 #>>44491378 #>>44491959 #>>44492492 #>>44493555 #>>44493572 #>>44494027 #>>44494120 #>>44497425 #>>44500290 #
1. TeMPOraL ◴[] No.44494120[source]
Agreed. I'm also in favor of anthropomorphizing, because not doing so confuses people about the nature and capabilities of these models even more.

Whether it's hallucinations, prompt injections, various other security vulnerabilities/scenarios, or problems with doing math, backtracking, getting confused - there's a steady supply of "problems" that some people are surprised to discover and even more surprised this isn't being definitively fixed. Thing is, none of that is surprising, and these things are not bugs, they're flip side of the features - but to see that, one has to realize that humans demonstrate those exact same failure modes.

Especially when it comes to designing larger systems incorporating LLM "agents", it really helps to think of them as humans - because the problems those systems face are exactly the same as you get with systems incorporating people, and mostly for the same underlying reasons. Anthropomorphizing LLMs cuts through a lot of misconceptions and false paths, and helps one realize that we have millennia of experience with people-centric computing systems (aka. bureaucracy) that's directly transferrable.

replies(1): >>44495459 #
2. godelski ◴[] No.44495459[source]
I disagree. Anthropomorphization can be a very useful tool but I think it is currently over used and is a very tricky tool to use when communicating with a more general audience.

I think looking at physics might be a good example. We love our simplified examples and there's a big culture of trying to explain things to the lay person (mostly because the topics are incredibly complex). But how many people have misunderstood an observer of a quantum event with "a human" and do not consider "a photon" as an observer? How many people think in Schrodinger's Cat that the cat is both alive and dead?[0] Or believe in a multiverse. There's plenty of examples we can point to.

While these analogies *can* be extremely helpful, they *can* also be extremely harmful. This is especially true as information is usually passed through a game of telephone[1]. There is information loss and with it, interpretation becomes more difficult. Often a very subtle part can make a critical distinction.

I'm not against anthropomorphization[2], but I do think we should be cautious about how we use it. The imprecise nature of it is the exact reason we should be mindful of when and how to use it. We know that the anthropomorphized analogy is wrong. So we have to think about "how wrong" it is for a given setting. We should also be careful to think about how it may be misinterpreted. That's all I'm trying to say. And isn't this what we should be doing if we want to communicate effectively?

[0] It is not. It is either. The point of this thought experiment is that we cannot know the answer without looking inside. There is information loss and the event is not deterministic. It directly relates to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Godel's Incompleteness, or the Halting Problem. All these things are (loosely) related around the inability to have absolute determinism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44494022